Amazon Alexa Reportedly Secretly Recorded Conversation and Sent It to a Rando

I am a known Echo Dot evangelist. I love mine. I try to sell one — Jeff, I’m still waiting on my commission — to anybody who walks into my apartment. “Nah, it’s not that creepy,” I tell my concerned friends. “Well, it’s at least no MORE creepy than any other number of things we all do online already.” Today, I feel … a little potentially creeped out. A family in Portland claims that their Alexa recorded conversations in their home and then sent the audio files to a stranger in Seattle. (Note: The recipient was in the family’s contact list.)

The recipient in Seattle called the family. “Unplug your Alexa devices right now,” he said, Kiro 7 reports. “You’re being hacked.” The family said they promptly did just that. “We unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house,” Danielle — the family declined to give their last name for privacy — said. “At first, my husband was, like, ‘no you didn’t!’ And the (recipient of the message) said ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘oh gosh, you really did hear us.’”

Amazon provided the following statement regarding the alleged incident:

Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future.